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Archive for the 'Apple' Category

The Problem with Open - Android vs iPhone.

There has been lots of talk about Apple is doomed to fail with the iPhone as a software Platform and the Android platform is going to be so much better, simple because its open.

Firstly, take a look at the iPhone. Its a fantastically designed device, and the attention to detail is insane - that’s not to say the Android platform isn’t. But it is a sensible justification that the platform needs to slightly closed to allow a continuity of quality to be maintained. Secondly, the iTunes to iPhone facility has yet to face any real competition, its far from perfect but there is a seamless connection from buying to using. You click buy and the app or music is downloaded and synced to your phone, without having to drag and drop, move or do anything manually. However there is growing concern that the closed nature of the platform will be its undoing see Pull My Finger [1] Continue reading ‘The Problem with Open - Android vs iPhone.’

WWDC Roundup - iPhone 3G & Mobile Me

WWDC was a bit of a let down, iphone alleys’ coverage by ustream however was fantastic. I was expecting more information and more products, not a grueling 45mins of demo’s of apps we cant use for a month, not quite the usual Apple finesse we have come to appreciate.

One important thing to note was Steve Job’s committed to pricing the new 8gb iPhone at no more that $199US in all 70 countries the iPhone 3g will be sold in by the end of the year. I hope this is the signal of a much bigger push by Apple to price equivalently in all countries. That said they create products people will gladly pay for in some cases even twice such as myself who will be upgrading come July 11th once again.

Surprisingly the announcement of OS X 10.6 dubbed Snow Leopard was pushed from the forefront of the announcement, giving credence to the fact it will not be a stability release just a fit and polish release to keep ahead of the competition. Also .mac will be no longer and be replaced by mobile me, which has to be an improvement of the aging .mac name and technology.

It was a bit of a let down in the fact that Steve had very little stage time, some reported as usually steve looked ill.

Shock Horror - There was no one more thing.

Apple No Go @ Expos

Macworld is reporting that Apple will not attend the Apple Expo in France this year. 

Apple: We are attending fewer trade shows each year

My question is, does anybody really think Apple need to attend every expo. They generate more than enough publicity for any company without saying anything.

Unconfirmed List for next week WWDC

  • iPhone 2 & All the trimmings
  • New macs of any description
  • Mac OS X 10.6 - Snow Leopard

iTunes Movies - An Inconvenient Truth


It was less then 30 minutes after the official word that iTunes was selling films in the UK store, before I was watching Batman Begins. But is the convenience coming at too high a cost?

In the UK we have become used getting ripped off around every corner, it stinks but we are British so we put up with it. My problem is that some of the films now available particularly Al Gores documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” £10.99 At this point the noveltywore off, I can have this shipped to me from amazon £6.22 in less than two days.

I aren’t apposed to paying £6.99 for a film, but £10.99 for a film that you can buy in the shops for less than £7 I think its pushing it. Us Brits whilst being hard done by after getting the long of the stick for so many years we have all become cynics, and easily see where profiteering is taking place. We saw it with the iPhone, which didn’t do anywhere near as well as planned (see here) We also see it with practically every computer or gadget, when you get nearly 2$US to £1GBP and the prices of things are the same in dollars as pounds you know there is something wrong.

Unless iTunes get more content up in the store and stop stupid pricing, they may just take off. Who am I kidding it will take off whatever apple do, its what their good at. I would like to think that Apple at least get some semblance of order in pricing and price match with the High Street.

How I became Inspector Gadget.

There are certain points in your life where you can’t help but look back on the preceding years. Officially I have now left college on study leave, until 20 June, which is my last day ever. So how the hell did I end up at this point.

My first exposure to a computer was a windows 3.1 machine in 1995, it was god awful but I was only five and young kids and technology don’t really get on. It was a good few years before I got a computer of my own, I ended up with a Pentium 1 MX running Windows 95, which didn’t last long. I couldn’t play any games on it, and it was stable as a long pole with a plate on it. So inevetably it was upgraded to a machine running Windows 98 Pentium 2, with a decent graphics card and MPEG decoder card.

 

Its probably at that point that the bug really caught me, from then on in I had a slew of applications and experiments going on the poor computer, which I still have under my desk. Three computers later and I made the big switch to Mac, something which I haven’t regretted, and still manage to keep up with windows excluding Vista which is almost as bad as 3.1. I also managed to pick up Ruby on Rails and a bit of PHP along the way, and ashamed as I am to say it Visual Basic.

People always ask me how I know how computers work. The simple answer is I have been tinkering with them for far too long. Every computer I have owned has been broken replaced upgraded and attacked by me, leading me to come across practically every common error you can get. Its sad to say but I can usually diagnose a hardware fault before the BIOS has finished its self test at boot up, and a software problem by hitting less then 10 commands.

The trend over the last few years is people are using technology every waking moment, but very few know how the stuff works. I love knowing how it works, and couldn’t really care less about using it. I will strip things down take them to bits, rebuild them, and then maybe use them. Because of this I have a collection of gadgets and gizmos that few other people my age can boast. It also means, that college work can sometimes come a distant second to a new gadget or blog post.

I don’t procrastinate as such, I just love technology to distraction. Wait a minute that is technically procrastinating. I don’t know what career I may choose, convergent technologies mean that practically any field is open to me.

Best bit is I know there will never be a boring job, technology is getting more and more exciting the closer we get to the point on the curve we drop off.  

What’s Redmond up to?

Live Mesh puts you at the center of your digital world, seamlessly connecting you to the people, devices, programs, and information you care about - available wherever you happen to be. www.mesh.com

Microsoft being its usual self has joined the web 2.0 party, and looks as if the Yahoo! bid was a hint at a much larger plan.

So what exactly is the significance of Mesh and the whole Microsoft online play? Its validated a couple of ideas cloud computing is definitely going to have a massive impact the way in which we interact with both mobile devices and laptops/desktops, and also Microsoft has seen a little sense and is bending to the will of user. 

Office Online?

An obvious application that Microsoft will put into mesh is Office, quite frankly the current online offering is underwhelming and Google Docs beats it, but in mesh with a cross-platform version of office that follows you I would be willing to pay for that.

Did I here you say Cross-Platform?

Along with the announcement of Mesh some other intersting things came out of the tour, support for Macs! Is this a much bigger plan to get out of the Operating System business or transition to providing a thinned out operating system that can access mesh (They may even use an Open Source kernel) 

I think Microsoft has got themselves some new friends and I will be sure to check out Mesh in more detail very soon. Its going to interesting if they do it right…

O2: $15 per MB outside the UK

Well I was expecting the no easy way to upgrade to the 16gb iPhone from my 8gb. What I was not expecting is that you aren’t able to add the International Data Plan, to any iPhone tariff. So it costs a whopping £7.50 per mb thats a couple of cents shy of $15, whenever your outside the UK. The best they could come up with is leave your iPhone in Airplane mode for the duration of your trip.

Get a grip O2, even AT&T can offer Data plans for outside the US to iPhone customers.

My New iPhone Tariff

O2 LogoO2 obviously isn’t making enough money or selling enough iPhone’s to make it worth there while and they have completed re-structured there tariff plans, basically more for less. I don’t make enough calls to make it any cheaper for me anyway :-(More Details here

Apple isn’t all that bad after all…

Apple LogoHaving had some issues with iTunes over the last week, nothing downloading from the store to be specific. I just got an email from a nice person at iTunes Store support, saying the problem was fixed and I got 5 Free credits to boot. My lucks in, maybe I should do a lottery this week.

The move to VMware fusion just hasn’t happened, since the new Parallels update dropped earlier this wee, I have been impressed with the increased speed and the integration with exposé a feature which windows desperately needs and not just an alt+TAB varient like that of Vista.

In other news, CommonApp.org should get a medal for being impossible to understand if your an international applicant (like I am) there’s a lot they could learn from the new UCAS website, also good help documents would make it easier for people such as my self who haven’t got a clue.

I’m jumping ship - VMware Fusion

VMwareI just installed VMware fusion on my Macbook; Parallels they crept up behind you. Don’t get me wrong I love parallels and its incarnations, but VMware has a smaller feature set and its fast.

I have been running Fedora 7 through VMware, with it emulating to cores thats right you can virtulise stuff on multiple cores. It screams. I had a little trouble getting the resolutions right (this is because Fedora isn’t a supported OS) but a bit of googling (who knew this was now a verb) and I got it going.

I now have a fully operational Death Star, for use with my many future Ruby on Rails Projects. I am really looking forward to seeing what Parallels comes up with in there next version, all it really needs is more performance and I will have a dilemma which to use?

Safari 3 Check, Leopard Check

Apple Mac OS X - LeopardI always pick the best days to go to the Cinema after exams. I got in and the World of Apple has turned to jelly (at least mine anyway). Leopard = Yes! There is anything really revolutionary, but it doesn’t need a fancy new pair of Interface trousers, Finder looks fantastic, stacks (I have already being using folders to do this) Generally Leopard looks like a solid update, and as I said a long time ago, Leopard need not be singing and dancing upgrade. Just fix the quirks and add some useful features, also make sure the install takes less than 3-hours unlike the last 3 times I have set up Vista.

As for safari, I have switched back. First impressions, its polished and fast. Google Reader now no longer has the weird beach ball effect when loading the next lot of stories, its also a lot faster than Firefox loading, Visual Rich Editor in Wordpress works (although it has its quirks). It also has the Element Inspector from WebKit which is incredibly useful to me making sure websites work. It also just seems to feel better, nothing much has changed but it seems to run more smoothly even load web pages faster?

In the process of making this post I have corrected 4 errors, on the website. Due to Safari 3 not liking certain elements. 

The Most Helpful Applescript Ever.

iTunes LogoI have a ever growing iTunes library, but sometimes when importing stuff, the ID3 tags go all wrong, or in the in Japanese/Non-English Characters. So like many geeks I hate having to mess with each ID3 tag individualy even if iTunes makes it easy. Solution CDDB and a little script from dougscripts.co. You simply go to the playlist, run the first script which searches CDDB to find the album your playing, then you run the second script that then copies the page details and puts them in your ID3 tags. Voila! your library is nice and perfectly formed.

Piracy: The Loss of Objectivity and Intelligence

“Unfortunately, many schools have turned a blind eye to piracy,” Berman said. “I don’t doubt that there are legitimate issues that universities must grapple with, including privacy and cost concerns. However, when a university such as Purdue tells the AP that it rarely even notifies students accused by the RIAA because it is too much trouble to track down alleged offenders—such inaction is unacceptable.”Congressman Hollywood: Universities a wretched hive of scum and villainy

This is what happens when a person in power, brains’ get turned to jelly and is spat out by the cat. It never occurs to these people funding researching and going around screaming disaster and catastrophe from the hill tops, to actually look what is right in front of them.

The Music/Movie Industries is Inherently, poor at adapting
So what exactly does this mean well its quite simple. When Napster came along the Music industry looked at it and said “We still good it will all blow over in a couple of months” Then a couple of months later they had a problem. The same goes for the Movie industry. They are arrogant enough to dimiss a technology that will quite clearly effect them in the money making department and try to place the sole blame on the cosumer. The consumers pay them money in the first Place

Solve not Sue
Anyone with a slight business interlect and brain cell(s) would look at the current situation within the Music/Movie industry and start working on solutions, put the money were it is well spent. The industry will never change the habits of the youth of today, they have spent to long in the courts increasing the resentment for that. They need to start working to give the consumer product they want in the form they want, this by no means free.

The idea that forcing your consumers to do something because the man companies say it should be is completly stupid and cause more illegal downloading, just so you as a consumer feel happy your pissing the said companies off. Everybody knows that downloading music and not paying for it is wrong, but when the labels offer no better alternatives, what else are your options.

The Other Options
iTunes Store, has a big market share and a big catalog of major labels and indie music, look deeply at the  Store and you see just what a miracle it is, its there, and in the same moment why it doesn’t give what a p2p client gives. The simple matter of choice is what it now starts to boil down to, what could be classed as the catalyst to this whole thing in the first place.

People want choice they want to choose how they consume media and where, iTunes limits you to the iPod and your PC/Mac, there is a simple solution get rid of DRM and completely and open the whole thing up, and I would never illegally download again.

However, there is one place that iTunes excells at apart from providing a seamless UI experience. Our friend the Longtail, p2p only really is a good distribution system for popular tracks, when you get to less popular tracks you quickly find nobody sharing things.

To cut a long story short we need a solution, that the consumer is happy with and we need it fast else we could see everybody going down to court.

Less DRM is Good…


Sign an Open Letter To Steve Jobs
Whether you believe that it was an elaborate publicity stunt or actually Steve Jobs own hand that wrote the “Thoughts on Music” there is one important feature that we all need to take action upon.

The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

Lets see if the people of the internets will prevail and get rid of DRM, or at the very least start the removal process. Sign the Defective Design Letter Here

Microsoft Does it again…

A Vista ad i saw at Microcenter, I just thought it was kind of funny that they decided to use a mac in the ad.

read more | digg story

Its obviously a stock image but you would think Microsoft with a marketing budget that could dwarf Dells would spend a little money in getting images of laptops that actually Run Vista, and Bill Gates has once again shot himself in the foot with this along with the fact Vista is now cracked the suposably most secure operating system windows has ever made…